Born in Solingen, Germany in 1940, Pina Bausch began
her dance studies at the age of 15 at the Folkwang School in Essen, where
she studied with several teachers, including the renowned expressionist
choreographer Kurt Jooss. In 1959 she graduated and was awarded the Folkwang
prize for special achievement. With a stipend from the German Academic
Exchange Service (DAAD), Bausch went to New York in 1960 to study at The
Juilliard School with Anthony Tudor, José Limon, Louis Horst, Alfredo
Corvino, Margaret Craske, and La Meri, among others. At the same time she
performed with the Paul Sanasardo and Donya Feuer Dance Company and the
New American Ballet. Bausch later became a member of the Metropolitan Opera's
ballet company and also worked with Paul Taylor. She has remarked that
her two years in New York were among the most influential in her early
life and that when she thinks of New York, she feels a sense of homesickness.

In 1962, Bausch returned to Germany where she became a soloist in the
newly-formed Folkwang Ballett, working once again with Kurt Jooss, and
also with Hans Zülig, and especially with Jean Cébron. Her
choreographic career began in 1968 with
Fragmente, followed by Im
Wind der Zeit (In the Wind of Time), which later won first prize at
the Second International Choreographic Competition in Cologne. Bausch has
said that her impetus for taking up choreography was out of the frustration
of wanting something to dance. From 1969-73 she served as artistic director
of the company, while continuing to dance and choreograph. Bausch's work
was gaining notice and after creating the bachannale for Hans-Peter Lehmann's
production of Richard Wagner's
Tannhäuser for the Wuppertal
Opera Company in 1972, she was offered the directorship of the Wuppertal
Opera Ballet. Reluctant at first, Bausch agreed when she was permitted
to bring dancers from the Folkwang-Tanzstudio with her. Not long after
her arrival, the company became the Wuppertaler Tanztheater, and was later
renamed the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.

In her new position, Bausch helped revive modern dance in postwar Germany
which has its roots in Ausdrucktanz, or "expressive dance," which looked
to everyday movements to express personal experiences, and which gained
popularity in the 1920s. But with the rise of the Nazis and the war, modern
dance lost its vigor, many of its creators like Kurt Jooss left, and German
dance became isolated. After the war, there was little enthusiasm for Ausdrucktanz,
while classical ballet flourished. With Jooss's return in 1949, the re-established
Folkwang School provided one of the only places for formal training in
dance other than ballet. But it was not until the late 1960s and 1970s
that German modern dance began to regain momentum, in part due to the student
movement in West Germany. Young dancers felt constrained by the formalism
of German ballet and American post-modern dance, and rebelled against the
Americanization of their country. Some returned to the expressionism of
Ausdrucktanz and started to venture into new ground, combining it with
elements from the other arts. Toward the late 1970s, the term Tanztheater
or dance theater, began to be used to distinguish the work of these choreographers,
one of them being Pina Bausch.

The two Gluck operas and Frühlingsopfer are often cited
as the culmination of what Bausch was able to achieve within the bounds
of dance tradition, and 1976-78 as the period when her style makes a marked
change. German dance critic Jochen Schmidt sees
Ich Bring Dich um die
Ecke (I'll Do You In) in which the dancers sing the music, and Die
Sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins) and Fürchtet
Euch nicht! (Don't Be Afraid!), set to works by Kurt Weill and Bertolt
Brecht, as the beginning of her new style. The Weill-Brecht pieces balance
ballet, theater, and show business while engaging social criticism and
realism, and are in the form of a revue that is not continuously choreographed,
appearing fragmentary. A crisis arose at this point when some in the company
felt there was not enough dance being incorporated, so Bausch began working
with a smaller group who accepted the style she was developing.

Since her first days in Wuppertal, Bausch has created more than thirty
full-length works. Three of her most celebrated works are from 1978 and
1979. Café Müller which is supposedly
based on her recollections of her parents' inn,Kontakthof
(Difficult Place) which looks at self-display and begins with each member
showing him or herself from different angles, as well as revealing their teeth,
and Arien (Arias) in which the dancers move in
a pool of water that slows their movement, drenches their clothing, and
reveals their bodies and vulnerability. Bausch once indicated that the
early 1980s was a time when she focused on the world and our fear of violence
and disaster. In Nelken (Carnations) from 1982,
the performers play increasingly vicious childhood games while watched
by armed guards and dogs. Since the mid 1980s, Bausch has created a number
of place-inspired works for which her company spent time at each site gathering
information. The most recent are Nur Du(Only
You) inspired by the western U.S. and based primarily on a stay in Los
Angeles,
Der Fensterputzer (The Window Washer)
inspired by Hong Kong, and Masurca Fogo, by Lisbon. Others include
Viktor
(Rome); Palermo, Palermo; Tanzabend II (Dance Evening 2)
(Madrid); and
Ein Trauerspiel (A Tragedy) (Vienna).

Bausch has also ventured into acting, in Federico Fellini's
E
la nave va (1982), and filmmaking in 1987-90, directing
Die Klage
der Kaiserin (The Plaint of the Emperess). Her latest stage work, O
Dido, had its first performance in April of this year.

Bausch has been criticized for overusing it to the point of ennui.
But she says, "You can see it like this or like that. It just depends
on the way you watch."

It is not dance in the conventional sense nor is it orthodox
theater since dialogue does not sustain the drama. Bausch has said
that she's never considered what she does as choreography, but as
expressing feelings by whatever means will best convey them. The most
well known statement by Bausch comes from an interview with Jochen
Schmidt in which she says, "I'm not interested in how people move,
but what moves them." As in Ausdrucktanz, or "expressive dance,"
which looked to everyday movements to express personal experiences
and which gained popularity in the 1920s, Bausch aims to use emotive
gesture, but in a new way. For her the individual's experience is the
critical component and is expressed in bodily terms, thus creating a
new type of body language. By doing this, the role of the body is
redefined from one in which it disappears into the function of
creation and is objectified, as is typical in ballet and most dance,
to one in which it becomes the subject of the performance. Each
dancer's body tells its own story based on what it has
experienced.

One method Bausch uses while creating a piece is to ask her
dancers questions about their personal experiences, such as in
Nelken (Carnations), in which each member
of the troupe tells personal accounts about their first love. When asked questions, some respond spontaneously, others
contemplate and rehearse. The resulting stories, images, and gestures
are sometimes used in the piece. "My pieces grow from the inside
out," she is known to say. When asked what she looks for in a dancer,
Bausch says that above all, "the person is important." Some have
commented that her dancers "don't look like dancers," referring to
the fact that they are of all shapes, sizes, and ages, but in fact,
most are trained dancers, which Bausch prefers, and all take dance classes daily. This company has no "stars" or designated soloists.

For Bausch, the choreography, stage, sets, space, time, music,
speech, costumes and personalities are all integral components and
help to communicate something that movements or words alone cannot.
Reviews often go into great detail about the sets, which have become
legendary. Rolf Borzik, stage and costume designer from 1974 until
his death in 1980, first set the tone and look of the pieces and was
succeeded by Peter Pabst as stage designer. The stage has at times
been filled with dirt or sod (Sacre du Printemps and Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei
gehört), dry leaves (Blaubart), live grass
(1980) and water (Arien). It has also
had thousands of pink plastic carnations (Nelken),
a mountain covered with 40,000 red silk flowers (Fensterputzer),
gigantic redwood logs (Nur Du), and a 5-ton
wall that comes crashing down (Palermo, Palermo). Arien includes a hippopotamus; Nur Du (Only You), a gigantic, blue
whale; Nelken, two police dogs; Viktor,
sheep; and Bandoneon, mice.

Bausch has frequently remarked that most of her pieces deal with
searching for love and intimacy, and relationships—particularly
between men and women, with all their tensions and difficulties.
There are many other recurrent themes but none has drawn more
attention, at least in the United States, than the frequent depiction
of violence, especially against women. Bausch makes clear that she is
no champion of violence but that it must be portrayed for the
audience to feel the suffering and anger it engenders. She has often
been called a feminist but refuses to be labeled as such, and denies
that there is any social or political agenda to her works.

Other recurring themes are angst, loneliness, alienation, the
inability to make human connections, rejection, and the struggle for
self-identity. But alongside these more somber themes are moments of
humor, tenderness, and hope, which are often overlooked. In the early
1980s, works like Nelken and Walzer
(Waltzes) took on a lighter quality and exhibited more humor and
gaiety. And although this "sunny period" which seemed to coincide
with the birth of Bausch's son was abandoned by the late eighties,
some later works, such as Nur Du and
Der Fensterputzer (The Window Washer),
return to lighter moods.